Page 1 of
2 THAILAND'S SOUTHERN
QUAGMIRE Battle for credibility in a grubby
war By Marc Askew
(This is the first of a
multi-part series)
It
had to come - an event that would drag Thailand's
press, even if briefly, away from the dominant
"national" issues of flood prevention plans and
the furor surrounding lese majeste laws, and back
to the murky little war in the deep south
provinces.
Since national elections held
in July last year, there has been little to
animate the mainstream press about the situation
in the border provinces, where low-level violence
has become routinized. This has not simply been
due to the distracting effects of the chronic
flooding across the country - the truth is that
official policy on the south is unremarkable,
indeed boringly cliched.
The
Yingluck Shinawatra government's policy statement
on the south repeated almost word-for-word the
aims of the earlier
Samak Sundaravej government,
with an emphasis on maintaining the safety of
citizens and fostering development based on the
royal mantra of "understanding, reaching out, and
development".
The previous Democrat
party-led government's approach, despite its
"politics leading the military" slogan, offered a
similar nostrum, spiced only by its flagship
measure to set up the Southern Border Province's
Administrative Center (SBPAC) as a separate
legislatively-mandated body with budgetary powers
independent of the army and with greater power and
status for its secretary-general (formerly a
"director"). Also under the "justice" rubric, the
Democrats encouraged insurgents to give themselves
up in return for re-education but over two years
the policy has failed to attract any takers.
The
appointment last October of a new (allegedly
former premier Thaksin-Shinawatra-aligned)
secretary general of the SBPAC, former police
general Thawee Sodsong, previously permanent
secretary of the Justice Ministry, offered nothing
substantially different from the previous SBPAC
head Phanu Utthairat, with an approach devoted to
"development" and "justice".
Following bureaucratic
fashion in the south, Thawee has coined his own
signature slogan "justice leading politics". To
herald his arrival in the border provinces, this
obscure motto was plastered over large roadside
billboards under Thawee's smiling portrait. Thawee
had earlier emphasized that to achieve "justice",
the law should not be applied strictly to the
letter.
In concrete terms this
referred to the need to assure more lenient
sentencing of imprisoned insurgent suspects, and
the provision of bail funds for prisoners awaiting
trial under security related charges. None of this
was actually new and military officers under the
Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) have
been quietly undertaking such work for over a
year.
More explicitly, Thawee
announced that his key measure was to increase
compensation payments to victims of violence. And
to curry favor with the Muslim religious elites
and kick off his new job, he pressed for the
re-opening of the Islam Burapha religious school,
which had been closed by authorities in mid-2007
following the arrest of suspected bomb-makers and
discovery of weapons on the premises.
Certain military officers
have not been impressed by Thawee's measure,
highlighting simmering differences between
military and civilian officials. Now, a recent
controversial shooting incident in Pattani
province seriously threatens the benign scenario
being cultivated by Thawee and province
bureaucrats. It also brought home the fact that
Thailand's messy war is not going to make the
state's task easier, despite confectioned formula
rhetoric about development and justice.
Contested deaths On the evening of January 29,
volunteer rangers on the alert for suspects
escaping the scene of a bombing attack on one of
their bases in Pattani's Nong Chik district fired
on a pick up truck carrying Malay Muslim
villagers, killing four outright and wounding
another six. One of the wounded later died,
bringing the fatalities to five. The earliest
reports of the incident the next morning were
fragmented, and there were already signs that a
controversy was brewing.
Reports noted that an outpost
of a company of the 43rd Ranger Regiment had been
hit by grenades fired from an M-79 grenade
launcher (two failed to explode but one injured a
ranger.) Following the attack, a ranger squad on
the look out for the culprits (some two kilometers
away from the attack site) noticed a pickup truck
traveling against the traffic flow near highway
418, a newly opened route between Yala and
Pattani.
Other reports noted that the
truck had refused to stop when hailed, and had
speedily reversed into a ditch, after which the
shooting took place. At least one AK-47 assault
rifle was reportedly found in the truck after the
shooting.
But all was not
clear. Survivors of the attack claimed that they
were on the way to pray at a relative's funeral in
a nearby village when they were suddenly fired
upon. Two of the victims were over 60 years of
age. More information dribbled out towards midday,
both supporting and contradicting the army's story
that in firing on the villagers the rangers had
been responding to a genuine threat.
Interviewed outside
Government House following an urgent meeting with
Prime Minister Yingluck, the newly-appointed
Deputy Prime Minister in charge of security,
former general Yutthasak Sasiprapha, affirmed to
journalists that the victims were not innocent
villagers, and their claim to be traveling to a
funeral was suspect.
He based his judgment on the
evidence of the vehicle's behavior prior to the
event, the fact that the pickup had apparently
been accompanied by suspects on motorcycles, that
the rangers reported to have been fired upon
before they retaliated, and that "many weapons"
had been discovered. Yutthasak's
shoot-from-the-hip reaction to journalists was
unwise and insensitive, though it was based on
preliminary information from ISOC Region 4
sources.
ISOC Region 4's damage
control man, Major General Akkara Thiproj,
conceded later that afternoon the fact that the
slain and wounded villagers were not recorded on
any lists of suspected insurgents but insisted
that at least one insurgent had jumped onto the
villagers' vehicle during his escape and
definitely fired at the rangers prior to fleeing
from the scene, thus provoking the ranger's
response.
Lieutenant General Udomchai
Thammasarojrat, Fourth Region army head, publicly
expressed his regrets and "responsibility" for the
event but also emphasized that the rangers had
been protecting themselves. To defuse tensions,
Udomchai transferred two companies of rangers out
of the Nong Chik area.
The
next day, Yutthasak modified his position by
conceding that most occupants of the vehicle were
not insurgents but echoed the army's claim that
one insurgent had fired at the troops first. The
army's story was then that both the villagers and
the rangers were victims of insurgent
manipulation.
But this message was ambiguous
because at the same time Udomchai, echoing premier
Yingluck and army commander-in-chief General
Prayuth Chan-ocha, assured the public that if the
investigation proved that any troops were culpable
of using excessive force, acting beyond
established rules of engagement, then they would
face judicial punishment. Following this southern
army figures laid low and commenced their
investigation which is slated to report its
results in 30 days.
Polemical battles From the outset, the army was
unable to control the story of the Nong Chik
shootings.
For four consecutive days the
evolving controversy made the front pages of most
newspapers, both Thai and English language,
bringing the south into sharp public focus for the
first time since the bombings at Sungai-Kolok in
mid-September last year. An uproar of condemnation
burst forth from local Pattani residents, southern
and Bangkok-based journalists and rights advocacy
groups. Though this response was understandable,
some claims over the incident were extreme,
exaggerated and premature.
This
highlights the fact that while the south's grubby
war on the ground has no front lines, in the
battle of polemics the positions on the south are
as fixed and entrenched as they were eight years
ago. Akkara's choreographed media release and
Yutthasak's initial comments were heavily attacked
by senior Thai columnists of prominent
south-focused Internet news sites.
Isra
News Agency's Phakon Pheungnet, a journalist long
critical of the military, dismissed Akkara's
scenario of a hidden insurgent provocateur. He
suggested instead that the AK-47 shells at the
attack site were all from ranger weapons, and
railed at Yutthasak for his insensitivity in
branding the innocent victims as insurgents.
Chaiyong Maneerungsakul,
president of the Press Association of Southern
Thailand and a staunch critic of Akkara, favored
the testimony of the survivors who said that there
were no weapons in their vehicle, thus implying
that the guns were planted by the rangers after
the event. He placed the Nong Chik shooting in the
context of previous cases such as the killings at
the al-Furqan Mosque in 2009.
Unless the details of the
event were clarified quickly and decisively, the
state would lose the trust of residents to the
benefit of the insurgent movement, and no amount
of financial compensation could reverse this
erosion, Chaiyong argued.
Two
days after the killings, Yingluck ordered Prayuth
to launch an official army inquiry while the
Pattani governor had announced his own
investigation. But prominent rights advocates and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) favored the
accounts of the survivors (though they varied) and
lost no time in releasing statements condemning
the military.
Angkhana Neelaphaichit, head
of the Justice for Peace Foundation, pronounced
that the district chief of Nong Chik was prevented
by rangers from attending the scene and indicated
that a cover up had taken place. She relied on one
survivor's account in proclaiming that the
villagers had been fired upon without warning to
demand that Yutthasak and ISOC Region 4 publicly
admit that a mistake had been made. Adding
hyperbole to moral outrage, she claimed that there
were growing signs that the extrajudicial killings
of the Thaksin era were returning to the
region.
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